Anglicans now inhabit a shared context, a common parish. As Anglicans "learn to be where we are," we must describe the church in ways that capture our transnational, interrelated context.
Credit: www.shutterstock.com

On 2 November, it will be ten years since Gene Robinson was consecrated bishop of New Hampshire. The Anglican Communion continues to be rocked by the waves of discontent that this event has left in its wake. The ordination of a gay man to the episcopate was the spark that ignited fierce divisions within the Episcopal Church of the United States of America, but also among Anglicans across the globe.

This event, more than any other, is what has led to the second Global Anglican Futures Conference (GAFCON II), which will gather in Nairobi later this month to discuss the future of the Anglican Communion. GAFCON is a gathering of conservative critics of the status quo in the Anglican Communion, many of whom were first mobilized by their opposition to the consecration of Robinson. In such a context, recent articles by Stanley Hauerwas and Michael Jensen celebrating the centrality of local particularity in the Anglican tradition strike me as rather ironic.

Stanley Hauerwas's article "Does Anglicanism have a future?" offers a spirited defence of the parish system of church organization. He argues that Anglicanism's emphasis on the local place serves as a contrast to the popular idea that one should choose the church one attends. The Anglican focus on place, he contends, not only represents a counter-cultural stance against the dominant voluntaristic individualism of modern culture, it also fosters a connection between diverse people in a local community. Drawing from the work of Bruce Kaye, Hauerwas argues that the Anglican expression of Christianity is one which emphasises that "each person must respond [to the gospel] by making the whole of their life subject to the everyday interactions of the community of the church." He admits that such a stance must accept the inevitability of diversity, as well as of conflict. Nevertheless, he suggests that the "universality of the cross" will unite churches as they engage with each other.

Michael Jensen's discussion of the history of the Anglican Diocese of Sydney offers a somewhat different account of Anglicanism. He shows that, during the latter decades of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, the vision of the diocese was largely "introspective and futurist." Although Jensen argues that it would be an exaggeration to suggest that the diocese's reaction to the rise of secularism amounted to "world abandonment," he does state that the decline of the church's social prestige led it to turn inward on itself and neglect the community around it.

While Hauerwas argues that the Anglican parish system focuses on the church's roots in a specific place, Jensen suggests that Sydney's withdrawal from local politics burned important bridges to the surrounding community. Hauerwas celebrates what he takes to be Anglicanism's ideal; Jensen describes what the church's actuality often is. But each encourages churches to see themselves as part of the local community, while admitting that, historically, when this tendency has been prominent in Anglicanism, it was due largely to the fact that the church was intimately embedded in the established social order. They now urge the church to return to a focus on locality, even as they note the erosion of the former sociological foundations of this Anglican ecclesial ideal.

There is thus considerable romantic sentimentality in both of these articles. This is clearly signalled by the fact that neither engages directly with the issues that plague the contemporary global Anglican Communion: sexuality, GAFCON, the Anglican Covenant, or even that contentious term, "orthodoxy." While they celebrate the particularity of the local, they don't address how the differences that emerge in distinct places can be held together within a more general universality. The tensions between particularity and universality are side-stepped in both articles. Hauerwas seeks to unite the universal and particular in the "place of Jesus." Jensen simply suggests that "the martyrs of the early church" were "the most effective mission strategy ever devised." In both cases, the proposed resolution implies that differences simply melt into commonality when described in such a way.

The limitations of employing sentimental rhetoric to mend divisions between different "places" in the Communion are in evidence everywhere. In July, the chairman of GAFCON, Archbishop Eliud Wabukala of Kenya, accused the Episcopal Church of the United State of America and the Anglican Church of Canada of promoting a "false gospel," and he implied that the Church of England is "advancing along the same path." In August, Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby himself described the Communion as being "like a drunk man walking near the edge of a cliff." Both Hauerwas and Jensen fail to addresses this situation in the Communion, even as they celebrate the local parish.

Hauerwas is correct to argue, following Rowan Williams, that "we need to learn to be where we are." But the pastoral imagery he evokes - Wendell Berry's traditional small farm and the stereotypical local parish - fail to capture the dynamics at work in the contemporary Communion. As such, Hauerwas neglects to explore the "place" that Anglicans presently inhabit. His anecdotes do not confront the ways in which the speed of modern communication compresses time and space. Different "places" and localities are no longer separated from each other in the way they used to be. What is happening in a church in Sydney can now be known - via the internet - immediately in far away Hong Kong, Kampala, Mexico City, or Pittsburgh. As such, different "local parishes" now intersect with each other in ways previously unimaginable.

This not only collapses the distance between distinct "places," but also closes the temporal gap between them. Instantaneous information results in a demand for instantaneous response. Time for considered reflection is increasingly under assault. On any given Sunday morning, a priest might be confronted by an angry parishioner, who demands to know what the Rector thinks about a statement made the previous day by an Archbishop in another Province thousands of miles away. The so-called "global village," one might say, now means that we must think in terms of a "global parish."

Thus, while Hauerwas (following Kaye) argues that the particularity of Jesus of Nazareth becomes universalised across the globe in particular and local ways, the new challenge confronting Christians is that these different particular expressions of Christianity now sit right next to each other, thanks to a virtual 24-hour news cycle. As Anthony Giddens observes, the intensification of modern trans-national relationships is such that "local happenings are shaped by events occurring many miles away." Social relations are being "lifted out" out their local contexts and restructured across time and space. Thus a bishop is consecrated in New Hampshire, and immediately an Archbishop in Nigeria responds. An Episcopal election is contested in Tanzania, and bloggers across the globe instantly construct conspiracy theories. When Justin Welby announces that he won't be attending GAFCON II because he must baptise a new heir to the throne, it quickly becomes an object of scrutiny in Florida.

This reality suggests that the calls to return to a focus on the local parish by Hauerwas and Jensen require considerable modification. When Jensen warns against Christians "talking only to each other and becoming increasingly incomprehensible to those on the outside," we should imagine this issue not simply as being limited to the Diocese of Sydney and its local community, but recognise that it applies to a much more expansive community "on the outside." Similarly, when Hauerwas suggests that Christians need to "learn to be where we are," the image that should come to mind is not of some small country village, but the global village.

If the Anglican Communion is to manage - as Hauerwas (following Kaye) puts it - "to maintain catholicity without Leviathan," it will only do so after coming to terms with the compression of space and time that has been produced by contemporary patterns of communication and travel. To accomplish this involves setting aside Hauerwas's idyllic farming imagery. Moreover, the individualistic language that Bruce Kaye employs to resolve the tension between the universal and particular also requires nuance. As Hauerwas describes it, Kaye brings together the universal and particular though the concept of the "personal," in the sense that each individual personally receives the gospel (universal) in a specific context (particular). The point is, however, that none of us receives the gospel exclusively in our own individual context; nor is the gospel ever exclusively "mine". Kaye's language of the "personal" does not naturally encourage the recognition of such nuance, and easily shifts into sentimentality.

Anglicans now inhabit a shared context, an overlapping locality, a common parish. Let us not, then, limit ourselves to lonely solitary images to describe the church, or be tempted into emphasising the purity of our "place" compared to the falsity of their "place." Instead, as we Anglicans labour to "learn to be where we are," we would do well to describe and imagine the space and time we occupy in ways that accurately capture our interrelated and transnational context. Such is now our "place."

It is not the symbol of the solitary farmer, but the cosmopolitan Ruth, who offers an antidote to the imagery offered by Hauerwas and Jensen: "Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay. Your people will be my people and your God my God" (Ruth 1:16).

Actions

Share

On the Wider Web

How can politics be set free from the deadly polarity between empty theatrics and corrupt, complacent plutocracy. What will it take to reacquaint people with control over their communities, shared and realistic values, patience with difference and confidence in their capacity for intelligent negotiation? It's the opposite of what Trump has appealed to. The question is whether the appalling clarity of this opposition can wake us up to work harder for the authentic and humane politics that seems in such short supply.

Writers reflected upon how he was changing the language. He defined the world as a source of endless threat and other countries as cradles of countless enemies. Global conspiracies were supposedly directed at his country and its uniquely righteous people. His left-wing opponents and the national minorities, he insisted, were not individuals but expressions of implacable international enmity to the righteous demands of his own people. He said that he spoke for his people, that he was their voice. He had no concern for factuality; what he said about others was meant to generate a certain fiction.

I'm with Aristotle, Machiavelli, Hannah Arendt, Rousseau, Montesquieu. I believe it's a higher mode of being to participate in your own self-government ... We all seek a sense of what it would be like to be fully connected to something. We all have a sense of what really living, and not just existing, would be. We know that there's a level of life that's rare to attain. And whether we attain that or not can be a source of deep satisfaction or shame to us.

Twitter

Subscribe

Receive updates from the ABC Religion & Ethics website. To subscribe, type your email address into
the field below and click 'Subscribe'.

Subscribe

How Does this Site Work?

This site is where you will find ABC stories, interviews and videos on the subject of Religion & Ethics. As you browse through the site, the links you follow will take you to stories as they appeared in their original context, whether from ABC News, a TV program or a radio interview. Please enjoy.